How long do people keep their New Year resolutions?

A fair share of Brits looking with guilt at their indulgence over the festive season will start the new year hoping to be a little healthier.

According to a ComRes poll for Bupa from November, 32% of Britons plan to make a New Year resolution in 2016 – roughly the same as in similar polls by YouGov in previous years. Across all the polls, health is the priority for those committing to a change in the new year.

When asked to choose from a list of which, if any, New Year resolutions they were planning to make, 35% of respondents to a 2015 YouGov poll said losing weight, while 33% wanted to get fitter and 31% wanted to eat more healthily.

These were all placed way ahead of competing resolutions such as seeing more of friends and family (14%) or getting a better work-life balance (12%).

But how long do these commitments last? The majority of those who made a New Year resolution in the ComRes poll last year actually claimed to have stuck to it, with only 41% admitting to having broken their latest one.However, there is a consistent discrepancy between the number of people who say they are going to make a New Year resolution and the number that admit they did so last year.

On top of this, 63% of respondents admitted to having broken one in the past and the majority of these (66%) admitted to doing so within just one month.

Although no data exists specifically for how long into the new year healthy diets will last, looking at new diets more generally it seems many do have an upper time limit.

Dietician Abigail Wilson, the chief executive of ISOShealth.com, says that on average the people she sees committing to new year diets only last a matter of weeks, and trying to do too much too quickly is to blame: “These diets are just that, they are diets, but they are not behavioural change and do not last for very long. The diets you choose need to be able to fit within your lifestyle. They need to be something that is realistic. It’s taken 10 years to get where you are with your weight, you’re not going to be able to fix it in five weeks.”

As FiveThirtyEight pointed out last year in a post on a huge analysis of different diet regimes, certain diets showed impressive weight loss after six months but followers seemed to have regained some of those pounds by the end of the year. The difficulty of sticking to the strict regimes of some diets can be partially to blame.

Gym memberships can be even less effective. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, 12% of new gym memberships start in January and a high proportion of gym income is from members who sign up to lengthy contracts and then attend irregularly, although the exact amount is unclear. The rise of budget, no contract gyms is making things a little less expensive for people whose commitment to fitness quickly waivers. Regular gym goers are in the minority with only one in 10 people in England going at least once a month, according to Sport England.

Wilson says those hoping to stick to a healthier regime should take things step by step rather than making drastic changes to their lifestyle: “Choose to overcome one behavioural change at a time and then move on, rather than making a whole lot of changes all at once because you’re guaranteed to fall over.”

Methodology: the ComRes/Bupa survey was based on interviews with 2,014 UK adults online between 20 and 22 November 2015. The YouGov/Pier Marketing survey was based on 2,025 UK adults between 15 and 16 December 2014.